US Fundamental Releases for April 19th-23rd
Data from the US is light this week, with any news-worthy fundamental events slated for the second half of the week. That will give market participants the chance to see how the SEC fraud case against Goldman Sachs plays out further in the financial markets in the first half of the week.
While we have releases on producer prices, sales of existing and new homes, and figures on durable goods, the release that may garner the most attention is the weekly jobless claims release as last week we had an unexpectedly high reading of 484K for the week ended April 10th. This Thursday’s release will cover the week through April 17th and is expected to show claims falling to 460K.
We saw a recent string of rising claims which has made the 4-week moving average of claims turn upward. That is disappointing since to create steady non-farm payroll increases that are greater than 100K jobless claims need to be around or below the 450K level. We get our next data point on Thursday.
Housing data this week is expected to show sales picked up in March, with new home sales rising to a 322K annual pace from February’s 308K which would be a 4.6% increase. Existing home sales are expected to climb 5.6% to a 5.28 million annual pace from 5.02 million the previous month.
The housing sector has seen some thawing after the winter months and with the government homebuyer tax credit due to expire at the end of April sales should pick up for March and April period.
We get another look at inflation this week following last week’s soft CPI reading. Producer prices, which had dropped 0.6% on the month in February, following a 1.4% increase in January, are expected to climb 0.4% in March. Core prices, those excluding food and energy, are forecast to climb 0.1% which would match the reading in February. Data pointing to tame inflation should be dollar bearish as it gives the Fed more leeway to keep interest rates at their record low levels.
As we can see from this look at the core annual rate of producer prices, we have been below the 2% level for the past six months. There just doesn’t seem to be any underlying inflation pressure building currently.
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